


stars shone brightly on us

by ashkatom



Category: Hatoful Kareshi | Hatoful Boyfriend
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 03:19:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7918456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashkatom/pseuds/ashkatom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doctor Kawara has had four assistants before you. You’ve read all of his publications, of course. You had expected someone more serious from those neatly-laid-out reports, the dry conclusions and recommendations - applicable on a large scale as a weapon of biological destruction. Not fervent, no - the Hawk line is that your research is necessary to create a real and lasting peace, but Doctor Kawara’s reports have never paid more than lip service to his source of funding. Someone serious, you had concluded, with certainty. Someone who took care with his research, who understood the applicability of can and should and how science blurs those lines.</p>
<p>His assistants may have had those traits. Ryuuji Kawara himself once conducted an experiment in which he duct-taped samples to his lab coat and then spun around in his desk chair ‘as fast as he could’ in order to see if he could replicate the effects of a centrifuge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stars shone brightly on us

**Author's Note:**

> Yo! Warning discussion time. There's some corpses briefly, although the description isn't anywhere near as explicit as [us that made this mess](http://www.archiveofourown.org/works/6653260). The underage warning is there because of the age difference between Ryuuji and Shuu, and Shuu is like... sixteen, when he takes over LiSciRe, but again: there's nothing explicit.

Utsuro Ichijou is dead.

He disappeared a long time ago, to be fair. The Ichijous filed all the appropriate missing persons forms, went through the scrutiny inherent in a heir disappearing after a fortuitous change in will leaving behind a vast fortune. But as of today, Utsuro Ichijou is declared dead _in absentia_ , meaning that Isa Souma is now free to distinguish himself as much as he likes.

“Doctor Kawara?” Your chaperon rests a reassuring hand on your shoulder. You look at it and say nothing. “We found the assistant you asked for. This is Isa Souma. His specialty is mycology and he expressed interest in working with LiSciRe.”

A head pops up from behind the desk your chaperon was talking to. Messy hair, a rumpled labcoat, and several days of stubble struggling to be a beard form your first in-person impression of Ryuuji Kawara, but your second impression is _red_. He gives you a once-over that is completely at odds with his casual appearance, and then breaks into a smile.

“Isa!” he says, and cheerfully climbs over his desk while you’re still arrested by the splash of unexpected colour in your world. You realise, too late, that you should bow, but by then his hand is already wrapping around yours. Perhaps he travels, is used to handshakes - but his fingers twine through yours, and he yanks you towards the desk at the back of the room. Your chaperon walks off, shaking his head, as you stumble after Ryuuji Kawara.

This is going to be the way of things, it seems.

—

Doctor Kawara has had four assistants before you. You’ve read all of his publications, of course. You had expected someone more serious from those neatly-laid-out reports, the dry conclusions and recommendations - _applicable on a large scale as a weapon of biological destruction_. Not fervent, no - the Hawk line is that your research is necessary to create a real and lasting peace, but Doctor Kawara’s reports have never paid more than lip service to his source of funding. Someone serious, you had concluded, with certainty. Someone who took care with his research, who understood the applicability of _can_ and _should_ and how science blurs those lines.

His assistants may have had those traits. Ryuuji Kawara himself once conducted an experiment in which he duct-taped samples to his lab coat and then spun around in his desk chair ‘as fast as he could’ in order to see if he could replicate the effects of a centrifuge.

He could not.

Still, after hunting down the files of his previous assistants, it becomes obvious that the reputation of the department is not due to them. Doctor Kawara is a madman with the attention span of a child, but he’s also working at all hours. He’ll spend three days straight humming cheerful tunes to a batch of samples as he slices through tissue with a scalpel. His slap-dash approach means that, a month into your new position, you’re already used to wildly-skewed results and a careless, “Oh, Isa! I ran some split tests on D-52A and B with some of that catalysing agent thrown in, what do you think?” The worst of it is that his actions are perfectly logical, once you dissect his reasoning and reach its bones.

Truth be told, you hate him a little. You have never been out of your depth in your life, and his (lack of a) scientific method ensures that you will never be able to keep up with him. His previous assistants all died whilst helping him develop one toxin or another, and you imagine that the eventual erosion of common sense in favour of the desire to impress brilliant, young department head Doctor Kawara was what led to the string of failures in proper lab safety.

You will impress him. You are young, too, and brilliant, too. People are inevitably impressed by you, enough to let you hide in your own reputation. Eventually, your reputation will be such that you need rely on nobody and nobody will disturb you. It will be you, the clean white of a lab (if not Ryuuji Kawara’s lab), the march of results. If being Doctor Kawara’s assistant is the next step on that path, you’ll perform in the role better than the incompetents before you, so desperate to shine alongside him that they find themselves eclipsed.

(You tell yourself this. He watches you with red, red eyes and smiles whenever he notices you noticing.)

—

He touches you all the time. Leaning on your shoulder as he looks at your screen, taking your hand thoughtlessly to drag you down a floor to talk to another department, wedging himself in next to you at a bench, reaching around you to guide your hands. You go stock-still whenever he does, the shock of casual contact - _any_ contact - buzzing beneath your ribs. You never learned this process - too young, too gifted. Too unloved; you’re very familiar with the typical milestones of an emotionally healthy child and how vast the gulf is between you and the norm. You don’t understand what pleasantness is supposed to be evoked by this invasion of your space, the presumption inherent in his actions.

If he wanted to elicit feelings of fondness in you, he could submit his data on time for once.

People respond well to him, though. You’re not idiotic enough to discount the strength charisma lends him. Ryuuji Kawara is head of the Life Science Research Division at an age where most people are still struggling through their doctorate, and while his research is a perfect storm of actual insight and applications the Hawk party salivate over, that isn’t enough to make division head. You would be division head, in that case. Instead, what makes your mentor dangerous is his easy charm and complete lack of a spine. He’ll promise the moon and then somehow deliver it. Three weeks late and over budget, certainly, but that hardly matters to most people when the moon is in front of them.

You learn to work around him. While you will never be used to the careless intimacy of his skin on yours, your moments of not knowing how to cope ( _what purpose what meaning what motivation_ ) become shorter, less detectable. He becomes part of the ambiance of the lab, a radio left on in another room. His inter-departmental chatter is educational, if not edifying. You will never have the deftness of touch to defuse situations the way he does - resentment over funding allocation, missing documentation, missed deadlines, and he skates through them all with a smile. You learn the value and cost of it by the way he slumps over his desk after, quiet for once. He shoves around his drifts of paperwork and starts going through the one neat stack of results you habitually produce for him to review. These are your favourite hours, when you get to watch his brow knit in concentration, pen tapping against his lip and occasional thoughtful noise the only thing breaking the silence. In these moments you get the Ryuuji Kawara you were curious about in the first place.

“I’m lucky I have you here, Isa,” he remarks into the quiet.

“Sir,” you say, toneless.

Kawara shoves the papers in front of him into a pile, lining the pages up with a brisk tap. “Don’t undermine yourself, Isa. If your superior compliments you, take it and run with it.” He catches your eye, and you nod, helpless in the face of that red gaze. “You know how good you are. Don’t dismiss it.”

“Sir,” you say again, though this time it’s only toneless because you can’t seem to catch your breath. You - have never liked people noticing you, never liked this style of reprimand about your potential and the way you choose to use it. He seems… not disappointed, though. Earnest, if tired.

“LiSciRe means a lot to me,” he says, without a hint of shame. Your eyes narrow, because - that’s not true, not entirely. You suspect that he would be entirely at ease anywhere that gives him this much freedom. He has precisely the curiosity that aligns him with a certain kind of why-not freedom, and he would be stifled without the chance to indulge it. He would also crash and burn if confronted by the need to ever be held accountable for his actions. “You put the whole of your effort into every single report you do. They showcase LiSciRe’s work to outside departments, raising our reputation. I know how lucky I am to have you here, Isa. I hope it’s where you want to be.”

A quiet room, just you and research. It is all you have ever wanted for as long as you can remember. The smell of bleach, perfectly even lighting, and absolutely nothing unexpected interrupting you. For some unthinkable reason, you are on the verge of letting this dream cross your lips - he _is_ supposed to be your mentor, isn’t it the job of a mentor to guide their protégé towards their dreams? Clearly he’s awful at it, given the fates your predecessors met, but…

Your dream seems a little bleak now. Unrealistic, without the sound of someone else humming, a sprawl of paper across two desks. It’s not that you’d _miss_ his constant intrusions, were you offered the opportunity for your own lab, just-

You expected to have to endure Ryuuji Kawara. You weren’t expecting to get _used_ to the situation, to find satisfaction in its certainty.

You never expected to actually catch his attention.

“Sir,” you say, a final time, neither confirming nor denying that you’re happy here. 

He laughs and goes back to reading your report, highlighter in one hand and chin resting on the other. He’s going to get his hands mixed up at some point and end up with a green stripe on his face, but there’s comfort in that certainty.

—

Nothing good can last.

This is something you learned in the hospital. Certainly, the rehabilitation was unpleasant, but that small room, removed from the world except for what the nurses brought in with them, was the first time you felt you could breathe. As much as you might have wished otherwise, the freedom you found there had a short, defined duration. As soon as you left, you were already planning to become Isa Souma.

So, while you allowed yourself to enjoy your time with LiSciRe, had even adapted to Ryuuji Kawara’s constant too-close presence, you have been expecting it to end. The ending of it is Doctor Kawara’s voice going flat, and an, “Ah. Nishikikouji. You’re back.”

“Kawara, you’re here for once!” The voice that replies sounds genuinely astonished, which has you tensing up. You don’t know why - you’ve thought the same thing about your department’s head more than once - but there’s something you don’t understand in this exchange. You don’t know how to categorise it, what its ramifications on you will be. “Ah \- don’t tell me they found you another one?”

This remark is clearly addressed to you. You straighten your shoulders and turn away from your work, resigned to having to deal with yet another social situation you don’t understand.

The newcomer is loud. In every sense of the word - he talks a little too loud for comfort, his voice more offensive to your ears than Doctor Kawara’s exclamations. His hair and eyes are the muddy no-colour that you see when something is nearly red, unnecessarily attention-grabbing. His thoughtful look watching you is… eerily similar to your mentor’s, but much less comfortable.

“What can I say?” Doctor Kawara shrugs. “The higher-ups are impressed by the results Biologicals is getting. They want to ensure the division is running smoothly. Isa’s been very helpful.”

“Hmph.” As the newcomer - you’ve already forgotten his name, it was absurd anyway - shifts into a more defensive pose, you realise that he’s not that much older than you. Certainly not old enough to be so casually displeased with a division head. “Opticals has been in a hiring freeze for six months. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Charm,” Doctor Kawara says lightly, and rests a hand on your shoulder. When you look up at him, his face is locked into an affable expression. You know it for a fake, because you’ve had long hours to study him, but it seems to fool the flashy intruder. “And Isa’s so valuable he more than pays for himself.” There’s a sharp pause of a moment, wherein the newcomer’s gaze flickers between you and your mentor, then Doctor Kawara lightly smacks his forehead. “Oh, silly me - Nishikikouji, Isa Souma, my new assistant. Isa, this is Tohri Nishikikouji, head of the Second Optical Weapons Division.”

Division head. You re-evaluate the idiot in front of you, press your lips together to stop them curling. Ryuuji Kawara may be hapless, but at least he isn’t some sneering, flashy child on a power trip. Your mentor hides it well, but he does the things he does according to some eternal cost-benefit analysis running in his head. You may not always understand the benefit, and sometimes you bear more of the cost than you would like, but time after time he has proven that his way has been right, unexpected payoff after unexpected payoff.

Nishiki… _this child_ of a department head looks very small, next to him.

“Nishikikouji’s division is the floor above ours,” Doctor Kawara tells you. “You’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other in the shared facilities.”

You nod once, short, sharp. That done, you turn back to your work.

—

At first, you think you might just be able to avoid him. You have a lot of work to do, after all, and as long as you can stay in the lab or the office you’re happy. Doctor Kawara nudges you to eat, though, and it takes only a few days to run into the loud, flashy nightmare.

He hops up to sit on the table beside you, crossing one leg over the other before pulling an odd curve of brass out of his pocket and beginning to file it. The noise of it makes you grit your teeth. “Biologicals has been doing well, with you on staff,” he says, without preamble. “Kawara couldn’t write a report to save his life, so I assume it’s you, anyway.”

You mutter an acknowledgment. The lack of enthusiasm does not slow him down at all.

“I suppose your specialty is in something squishy, or you wouldn’t be working with him.” He _tch_ s to himself, wiping away brass specks with his thumb before changing the angle of his file and starting again. “I don’t know what beauty the higher-ups see in that mess - the _squishing_ and the _corrosion_ , honestly, at least lasers are clean, don’t you think?”

You look up at him, level.

He looks back at you, then blinks, self-conscious, file skidding to a discordant stop. “Your- your work has value, of course, I wasn’t implying- I imagine now that there’s someone _sensible_ in the department that we may be able to co-operate better, instead of having this one-at-the-expense-of-the-other…” He peters out as you study him. You imagine you could have ended up like this, if you had chosen to protest rather than endure, to be unforgettable instead of peacefully ignored. All things considered, you prefer them as they are. The conclusion you have reached on the matter is that Niji… shi… is _incredibly annoying_. “I’ve read your reports,” he says, almost accusingly. “There’s no way somebody as organised as you actually _enjoys_ working with Ryuuji Kawara. Do you _know_ what happened to his last assistant?”

You pack away the remains of your lunch. Then, carefully, you gather the brass filings that have fallen on the table into your hand and dump them back on the loudmouth’s lap. Your hands tremble a little as you walk away, but really. You’ve faked your own death. Confronting an annoyance is nothing, comparatively. 

—

Doctor Kawara laughs when you tell him, the words coming haltingly in case you really have messed things up. “Nishikikouji can be a little blunt and overwhelming,” he says, and ruffles your hair. You stand there, stock-still, until he stops. “You were just defending your division. If he raises a fuss I’ll take care of it.”

You’ve heard that one before. This interpersonal conflict falls much more under Doctor Kawara’s sphere of expertise than yours, however, so he might actually be the one who takes care of it.

“Do you like it here?” he asks some time later, breaking you out of the spreadsheet you’ve become absorbed in. The decay rates of the latest iteration are - interesting. “In LiSciRe. I know I can be frustrating to work with…”

You look at him. You don’t like looking at people, generally. It’s… overwhelming, when you’re already talking to them. Too intimate. Avoidance is easier. The thought of losing your comfortable position, the place you’ve carved out for yourself, panics you enough to indulge the need for sincerity. The shock of his eyes - always shocking, always another reason to avoid this situation - takes all of the emphasis out of your voice, leaving it thin as paper. “Am I not a good assistant?”

He sucks in a breath. “Isa…” Gently, he tucks away the hair that fell in your face. “The opposite. I have to look out for you, you know.”

Something akin to dread fills you. The day-to-day of LiSciRe frequently annoys you, getting between you and the purity of purpose that you strive for. Regardless, you have adapted to it, when you thought you had lost the ability to do so. For all that Doctor Kawara projects the image of someone who has replaced their brain with helium, he is also more talented than everyone else you have met here put together. You don’t care if Ryuuji Kawara kills his assistants, or lives in the lab, or keeps the mold samples in the same fridge as his lunches (which are mold samples, regardless). This is your place now. You’ve gotten used to it. The prospect of change so soon…

“I have to prepare the next batch of samples,” you say, abrupt - _you_ can tell how abrupt it is, how ridiculous - and jerk away from him.

—

“Isa,” Doctor Kawara says, drawing your name out into something that is nearly a whine. “Have you ever thought about being division head?”

You look at him over the body the two of you are dissecting. “Now?”

Doctor Kawara shrugs. “We may as well talk! It’s not like our patient is going to object. It’s pretty boring being serious all the time.” From the way his mask contorts, you can tell he’s pulling a face under it. “Nurse, I need our entire stock of adrenaline, stat! We may make this man walk after all!”

Your dry look fails to rein him in. It always does, but he likes it when you don’t always humour him. Which is, in itself, a form of humouring him; the irony is not lost on you.

“I’m young,” you say, and lean in to inspect the cell decomposition. A significant amount of the body has decayed more than it should have according to how long it has been dead, and it apparently took effect while the subject was still alive. Coughing up blood is a good sign - for your work, anyway.

Doctor Kawara makes a thoughtful noise and leans in next to you to take a sample. His casual touch hardly fazes you now, but these rare moments unsettle you entirely. He doesn’t mean to touch you at all, is not touching you by a matter of important, sterile millimetres. It still feels a thousand times closer than any time he leans all over you in the office, bound together by your unspeakable task. “You’re not much younger than Nishikikouji was when he became head of the Second Optical Weapons Division.”

Your lip curls under your surgical mask. Annoyed, you fight the response back and say, “My only experience is in Life Science Research.”

“So?” Kawara asks, nearly a hum, as he shoos your hands out of the way to extract what remains of the subject’s liver.

You look at him, aghast. “Are you planning on retiring?”

He stops to look back at you, blinking in honest surprise, gore still dripping from his hands. “Of course not, Isa. Who’d look after you?”

You look back down to the body, excising a piece of lung with a vicious slash. “I don’t understand the purpose of your questioning, Doctor Kawara.”

Ryuuji laughs, breathless. “Don’t take your frustrations out on the corpse, Isa.” Carefully, he takes your hand and guides it in a long cut. “This makes a better sample, see?” When you don’t respond, because the feeling of something like dread is choking you again - it does it more and more these days, a sign that you should never have gotten so attached to LiSciRe in the first place - he hums and starts to portion the liver into sample tubes. You refocus on the lungs, dissecting them with the method he showed you. “Don’t worry, Isa. I’m not going to force you into anything. I was just thinking about how nice it would be if I could take you into the inter-departmental meetings. They’re always so boring.”

Hardly listening, you tug at a framework of delicate tissue and watch it tear. This body has been breaking itself down, even in cold storage. Perhaps, since your accident, you have been a little too fascinated by the way the body falls apart, by how people are a thousand clocks ticking perfectly in time until something goes wrong. Everything walks on that razor’s edge, attempting to maintain harmony, and few people have the slightest clue of the assault they are constantly under from theirselves. 

“I’m not retiring any time soon,” Doctor Kawara says, soft, not breaking your reverie. “But if I were to retire, I’d want someone who loves this like I do to follow me.” He touches your face, a complete disregard of operating theatre sterile practices, directing you to look at him. “That’s all that matters, Isa. I hope you’re that person.”

This is entirely out of your depth. You think of stuttering an answer, dismiss that as an option, and turn back to your work. “Don’t talk about that like you’ve made plans,” you say, hoping to change the situation as quickly as possible. “You’ve never made a plan in your life.”

For the rest of the day, no matter how thoroughly you wash your face, you can feel his fingertips staining you to your bones - red, red, _red_.

—

You would like to say that your mentor has the most absurd notions about teaching you the finer points of work-life balance, but you suspect that he has entirely sensible notions about justifying his inane adventures in your name, instead. If the both of you are away from the labs, neither of you can be reprimanded. Since this one time Doctor Kawara bursts in with a grin taking up half his face and life in his eyes happens when you are just about ready to calmly drop your computer out the one tiny window your office is afforded, you are less resistant to his impropriety than you usually are.

“Isa! Isa, there’s a meteor shower, we can catch it if we go now-” he grabs your hand and has you out the door before you can blink, your coat left hanging forlornly in the corner. He’s nearly to the elevator when an imperious yell of “Kawara!” has him slowing, though he doesn’t stop.

“Where are you going?” Noushi… ki… demands, eyes flicking between you and Doctor Kawara. “We need to set the agenda for the monthly meeting, don’t tell me you _forgot_ -”

Doctor Kawara raises an apologetic hand in front of his face, giving the Optics division head his most winning smile. You’re almost certain he practices them. “Tomorrow, Nishikikouji, I’m on an important educational mission for my protégé right now-”

“The meeting is tomorrow!” 

“Needs must,” Doctor Kawara says, airily. The elevator chimes, and he ushers you back into it. “Important LiSciRe business, can’t delay, this training is vital-” The elevator doors slide closed on the most outraged expression you have ever seen, and Doctor Kawara trails into silence before taking a deep breath. After one look at you, he bursts into a whoop of laughter, bumping you with his shoulder. “Sorry, sorry,” he wheezes. “I just don’t like Nishikikouji much. I guess you might have wanted him along, someone your age to talk to.”

You give him the most withering look you can manage. He laughs again, leaning a hand on your shoulder to steady himself as he doubles over. “Astronomy is on the roof,” you say when he recovers a little, just in time for the elevator to chime.

Doctor Kawara places a hand on the small of your back to guide you, and you let him. Through the glass doors of the lobby, you can see that the sun has only just set, the horizon still stained lighter than the rest of the sky. “But then we’d have to talk to the Astronomy division,” he says, sensibly, and switches to leading you by the hand. “Come on, there should be a good view up this way.”

‘This way’ turns out to be a park, which is at the top of an annoyingly steep hill. You’re panting and dragging yourself along by the time the two of you reach the top, your weaker right side hindering you, a burn of embarrassment that pushes you forward until Doctor Kawara stops you. “Here’s good,” he says, and falls to his knees with a contented sigh before flopping face-first into the grass. You eye it reluctantly \- if you’d _known_ he’d insist on a mad dash to freedom, you could have at least made him carry something to sit on - before carefully settling in beside him. Craning his neck, he checks his watch. “Things should start in fifteen minutes or so.”

You hug your knees to your chest and watch the sky darken. “Why did you want to leave?”

He rolls onto his back, hands linking to rest on his chest as he looks up at you. Even the lack of light does nothing to dim his gaze. “Ah,” he sighs, and looks away again. You look back to the night sky and pretend you weren’t watching him. “How can I put this…” There’s a long pause as he considers, then yawns. “LiSciRe is this huge, all-encompassing thing. It adopted me young too, you know, and my whole life has been nothing but the research since.” He stretches, his shirt riding up as he does his best to contort into a comfortable position. “It’s not like I don’t like it. But every so often I like the reminder that I can just drop everything and walk away. Maybe I’ll go back, maybe I won’t. The Hawk party can’t touch that decision, in my heart.”

Without the sun, the evening has gotten chilly. You draw your knees even closer and wish you’d grabbed your coat. “If you wanted to escape LiSciRe for a time, why did you bring me?”

“Good question,” he says, teasing, before looking at you and your determined not-shivering. “Isa! I didn’t realise-” He’s still wearing his lab coat, because he lacks the common sense usually found in children. At first, you think he’s going to give it to you, which is embarrassing enough, but instead he sits up and holds it open.

You should protest. You dislike touching people, being close to them. But the wind picks up, and you are used to Ryuuji Kawara hanging all over you anyway, so you uncurl enough to push yourself into his side and let him wrap the coat around you to hold you there.

Nobody has ever cared enough about you to worry about whether you’re warm, before.

“You’ll own the world one day, Isa,” he says, quietly. “If you want it. Remember that the Hawk party doesn’t own you.”

As he leans his head against yours, stars begin to fall.

—

Doctor Kawara is late the next day, which isn’t unusual. What is unusual is Bijikou… _ugh_. His peer, waiting at your desk when you arrive ten minutes early, blocking your computer so that you can’t turn it on.

“I don’t have the agenda,” you say, flatly, and reach around him to turn your computer on regardless.

“He’s married,” he says, flat. “He has a child. He goes home late at night and leaves early because he got _bored_ of them, Souma. His assistants all suffered their accidents when he was too bored to keep track of them properly. He flits from thing to thing, and will never once take responsibility for his neglect.” He holds up a detailed agenda, drums his fingers against it as he puts it on your desk. “He views things as a child does, black and white with no sense of consequences. Do not fall into that trap.”

“I don’t think anyone working for the Hawk party,” you say, cold, removed, devoid, “has a normal sense of consequences. Is that all?”

His fists ball. “It wasn’t an _insult,_ it-” When he can’t find the words he wants, he scoffs and throws his hands in the air, pushing off your desk to leave. “Don’t cry when he abandons you for the next interesting thing, Souma.”

You take the agenda and flip through it. Then, page by page, you pick it up and tear it into two, letting the pieces drop neatly into your bin.

—

“The meeting went great, Isa!” Doctor Kawara slings an arm around your shoulders as he leans down to look at your screen. “Someone’s been working hard.” You look at him and wait for him to return to his original topic. “Anyway,” he says, not disappointing you, “we got a bit of a funding bump. You’ll be taking responsibility for that research you wanted to do into viral modification. Oh, and I got permission to visit that geologist with the bacteria. I know it’s a long shot, but maybe if we can culture it properly.” He sighs and sits on the floor, leaning against your leg as he loosens his tie. “I wish you could go too, but the budget…”

You shake your head. 

“Ah, your right side.” Absent of anything else, he squeezes your ankle. “It’s fine. I need someone to take care of the lab anyway. Nobody else I trust more.”

You look back at your screen and start creating graphs again. As much as you’ve gotten used to Doctor Kawara’s presence, it will be nice having the lab to yourself for a while. There are experiments that you will be able to absorb yourself in, ones where having him burst into the room would be detrimental. Usually you do them in the morning, before he arrives, but paying them closer attention for a while will be… pleasant.

He falls asleep on your leg as you lose yourself in data and do your best to hope that this doesn’t make you boring.

—

Doctor Kawara’s first flight is late at night, which means he still comes into work in the morning. He stows his suitcase under his desk and ransacks the equipment cupboard mercilessly while you continue on with the usual activity of LiSciRe. The division is set to shift into a lower-production mode while its head is gone, but you want to wrap things up neatly as much as you can before you immerse yourself in your own experiments. Something in you itches for this, the first project you’ll lead on paper, a way to prove your worth to yourself.

He interrupts your reverie by wheeling his chair beside yours and slumping dramatically over you. He’s neither particularly tall nor broad, but he still outweighs you, meaning that you crumple sideways under his weight.

“You’re so industrious, Isa!” he sighs. “You’re not going to miss me at all, are you?”

You stop typing to consider this. Miss him? You can’t imagine ever missing a person. You hadn’t considered it, given your lack of experience with being attached to other human beings. And Doctor Kawara is always there; you haven’t had a chance to determine if missing someone is something that you can do.

You dislike change, though. For better or for worse, Ryuuji Kawara is an accepted part of your life, now. His inability to stand still, his constant need to be touching you, the humming and laughter and haring off to do ten other things, the crashing as he looks through the entire lab for the equipment he wants, eleventh-hour reports and incisive research to make up for the fact that one of his hobbies is juggling samples. He is LiSciRe to you, inextricably interwoven with the place you have made for yourself here.

This is the first place you have been yourself. The place you have grown into yourself, let the person you want to be grow instead of carefully pruning away anything that might draw attention.

“I will,” you say, and turn your attention back to your screen. “Not much,” you add, compelled by honesty; you already know you’ll be too busy to acknowledge the outside world. You expect Doctor Kawara to laugh, like he usually does when you’re accidentally too truthful. Instead, his hand - when did you become familiar with every callus, the shape of his fingers, the blunt scrape of his nails? - slides up your cheek, and before you can begin to react to that, his lips are on yours.

You freeze, which you haven’t done in a long time. This is - too much, you don’t know how to respond to this, what it signifies. The feeling - the mundane of it, the warmth of his lips, the scratch of his stubble, the closeness of his breath, those can be easily described. For the rest of it, it nearly _hurts_. It reminds you of nothing so much as the endless pins and needles feeling of your arm and leg when you first woke up after the accident, and it makes you whimper before you can ruthlessly cut the expression off. He breaks away at that, but when all you do is stare at him - his _eyes_ \- he leans back in and kisses you again. It makes no more sense than it did the first time, but for the first time, you hesitantly touch him. He makes a contented noise against your lips when your fingers tangle into his hair. His hands press you closer, sliding down your body until he can loosely wrap his arms around your waist. When he pulls away, you wait for him to tell you what this means.

“Miss me, Isa,” he says, and presses a casual kiss into your neck that makes you shudder.

“That isn’t how it works,” you tell him, confused, and he laughs.

—

Observation room. Misnamed, since you refuse to observe. You sit with your back to the window, refusing to look into the room it reveals. There’s an intercom on the wall above you, but you haven’t pressed the button. Don’t know if you will. Avoidance is a classic delaying tactic, your brain supplies, and you push the thought away by resting your head on your knees.

“Isa,” the intercom’s speaker crackles. Even over this poor connection, you can hear the fluid in his lungs. He’ll die tonight, if you’re any judge. Earlier, maybe.

“Doctor Kawara,” you say, out of rote more than anything else.

He laughs, which turns into a series of painful, hacking coughs. You can hear the hum of machinery in the background. The time you spent in hospital as Utsuro Ichijou was pleasant, as far as it went, and left you with no particular horror of hospitals. This experience is quickly changing that. “I think you can call me Ryuuji at this point, Isa.”

“Ryuuji,” you whisper, and there’s a long pause where you’re not sure if the intercom even picked it up.

“You met my wife, probably.” He doesn’t sound regretful, at all. You don’t understand the dynamic there. Maybe never will, if he doesn’t explain it. Motivations, cause and effect in emotions - you don’t understand that. Ryuuji has shielded you from that without even realising, letting you be who you want to be. “I… wasn’t there for her. Wasn’t there for anyone.”

You think of the late nights in the lab he spent with you and curl up tighter.

“Too late now,” he sighs. “Isa… I…”

There’s a strange laugh in his voice. It has been a long time since you last cried, but you recognise its precursors.

“You’re going to be amazing, Isa.” He coughs once, hacking. “I can’t make up for all my failures now. But if you’re ever in a position where you can do something for my son…”

“Yes,” you say, wooden. Ryuuji is still head of LiSciRe; still your boss. You do what your boss asks you to. That is how things work.

There’s another long silence, with only the painful wheeze of his breath and beeping of the monitors hooked to him between you.

“One last thing, Isa,” he says, finally.

—

Ryuuji Kawara was the only known host of an aggressive biological agent that the Hawk Party wishes to weaponise. He donated his body to science, as anyone who knew him could have expected. He died alone, too contagious for his family to sit by him, and now he lies on an operating table in front of you, stripped bare of anything that ever made him Ryuuji Kawara.

You’ve performed autopsies before. You performed autopsies with him; this is just another variant of that, if approached a certain way.

Something hot sparks behind your eyes as you make the Y-incision. You’re dressed in full protective gear, given that his corpse is still contagious, but the feeling still alarms you. Aggressive as the unnamed bacterium is, nothing acts that fast. Then a drop falls from your eye and pools uncomfortably in your goggles, and your fingers tighten around your scalpel. A hiccup rises in your throat, but if you let it escape, you suspect you will never recover. Instead, you grit your teeth, and swallow. This is too important. 

This was his last wish.

You abhor change. But you can’t be Isa Souma, who spent more time looking to Ryuuji Kawara than he realised. Isa Souma isn’t capable of ruthlessly dissecting his mentor.

Isa Souma, you decide, is dead, and complete the Y-incision.

—

“I can’t believe you didn’t go to the funeral,” the annoyance from Second Optical Weapons snaps at you, like it matters. “Everyone there was asking where you were-”

“There was no body there,” you say, calm. “There was nothing to mourn.”

“You’re still supposed to go!” he insists. “It’s like you didn’t even care, Souma. You’re the natural pick for the new head of LiSciRe and you just abandoned this duty - do you not know what you’re supposed to do?” His voice cracks. “He was the most important person in your life! I know that! Do you not even _mourn_ him?” His voice turns sharp. “Do you not know _how_?”

Dead flesh under your hands. Cutting away everything familiar to you, until you reached the final accounting of bone and blood that all people come down to. Your hands ball into fists. “Nobody ever told me,” you say, and it was meant to be sneering but it comes out desolate instead.

He’s taken aback. “Well,” he says, then rallies. “Are you just going to wait around for people to tell you how to do everything? That’s no trait for the next head of LiSciRe!”

No. That won’t do. You… you need the resources the Hawk party can provide. He scoffs, and walks away as you put yourself together, piece by piece, rebuilding yourself into a new whole.

Isa Souma is dead. You will become someone who can step into Ryuuji Kawara’s shoes, instead.


End file.
